


Ecdysis (as i was set to fall in)

by Dunamis



Category: Far Cry 5
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fairy Tale Elements, M/M, Missing Persons, Mystery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-23
Updated: 2018-10-01
Packaged: 2019-07-15 23:18:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16073459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dunamis/pseuds/Dunamis
Summary: There is a snake in his motel room, he dreams of sins and his name taken away, and Agent Rook just came to Hope County looking for a preacher who walked into the woods and never came out.Joseph Seed has been missing for two weeks.





	1. into the sky for your eagle eye

**Author's Note:**

> dear littlebiscuits: _you did this to me_.  
>  anyway, listen to Psyche by Massive Attack.
> 
> TW: death of an infant

 

 

Rook arrives in Hope County on a Thursday. It’s fall, and from a distance, the foliage makes it look like it’s on fire. He stops for gas before Fall’s End while Agent Burke waits in the car.

The man at the counter looks at the badge on his belt askance. “You here about the preacher?” he asks, leans forward onto his elbows. 

“This too,” Rook says, puts a pack of mints on the counter for Burke. He pulls out his wallet, swipes his card through the machine when it says it's ready.

“What’s the FBI want with a church man?” the man asks. Rook just smiles tightly before he leaves.

“You two were chatty,” Burke observes when he gets back in the car. He’s older than Rook. Smaller, like almost everyone. He’s angry about both. “Small towns talk. Try to keep your mouth shut.”

Rook came from a small town and knows that. Burke hadn’t, but he doesn't know Rook yet and making a point wouldn’t help him. “Got it,” Rook says, and keeps his small-town-mouth shut.

 

 

 

They arrive in Hope County.

Joseph Seed has been missing for two weeks.

 

 

 

 

Sheriff Whitehorse is happy to see them, which is unprecedented. He’s an older man with a stiff back and patience worn down to dust, which Rook understands when the missing man’s brother arrives.

John Seed was John Hudson was the scion of a line of lawyers who’d made every successive New York DA wish they were dead, a man with the right strings to pull. John Seed is the reason Rook and Burke got called, the reason why the Bureau cares about a preacher barely missing in rural Montana. Why Rook is there. Rook, who is bigger and younger and has found everyone he’s ever looked for, sometimes in pieces. Burke, because he’s local, a sentence short enough to make him angry.

John Seed is dark-haired and good looking even with bags under his eyes. He takes one look at Burke, one only, and talks to Rook from then on. Rook listens, watches John Seed gesture and pace. When he slows – not tired, he can see John Seed doesn’t tire – Rook speaks.

“I need to see your brother’s house.”

 

 

John leads the way, driving so fast that Burke has to speed to keep his taillights in view. Rook spends the time looking over the timeline one of the deputies – Hudson, who hissed whenever John so much as looked at her – had put together. Joseph Seed had gone missing on a Wednesday. He’d started the day with an early sermon, spent the morning volunteering with some of the congregation, doing odd jobs for the oddest townsfolk. He’d gotten lunch with his older brother Jacob at the veteran’s centre, then checked in with a member of his flock. Then he’d walked from her house to his car and driven away.

They’d found his car empty by the Henbane the next day. The enormous river that carved the county into pieces, arteries of dark, rapid-moving water that made the air damp.

Someone had written a note at the bottom of the page – _suicide?_

John leads them about half an hour away from town, over a bridge to a small, densely forested island. Past a plain white church by the river and up a long gravel road through the trees, until they reached a two-story colonial with a sprawling garden around the side. It’s white wood and a grey roof, like the church, and John leads them inside. He watches Rook like a hawk as Rook walks in, bending to get under the doorframe, and he stands there for a moment to take in the space.

Hardwood floors, white walls. Lots of natural light and only plain furniture in the living room to the left. Rook thinks, _spare_ , he thinks _big_. He also thinks _nice,_ which isn’t useful. Burke takes a step inside before he can stop him, but better late than never, so Rook turns. “Burke, can you please keep an eye on Mister Seed?” he asks. _Guard the car_ in so many words, but Burke isn’t subtle.

Rook looks around, then bends a little. People tend to move within a few degrees of their eyeline.

He gets to work.

 

Rook makes notes as he goes. Joseph Seed has a big house, but not a lot in it. The bare minimum of furniture in every room, simple stock in the kitchen. His main vice seems to be books, which span the walls of two separate rooms, mostly non-fiction with a surprising number of children’s books on the lower shelves. They’re well-loved, spines creased to hell.

Then there are the photos. Joseph Seed has a lot of photos, but very few include him. Shots of people outside a various churches, wide smiles and the starburst sign Seed seems to mark his halls of worship with. Shots of emotional intimacy, poor angles but zoomed in on smiles, on expressions of warmth, moments stolen for keeping. Random shots of landscapes, sweeping and devoid of people, which is interesting too.

When he gets to Seed’s bedroom, he finds an old shot of an exceptionally beautiful young woman ( _Anna Seed_ on the back) with a younger Joseph, his hair short and sunglasses square. There’s a more recent shot of him in his file. Long brown hair, in a bun, and a neat beard. Pale eyes that his description says are blue, neutralised by the yellow sunglasses he wears, necessary for light sensitivity. Handsome with a piercing gaze, intense even spat out of a dying printer cartridge.

His personal bible is on the nightstand. Well-creased. There are passages underlined, mostly old testament. The bookmark is a photo of a newborn, but there is no name on the back. Just a date, some twenty-three years earlier, and Rook takes it. When he walks back outside to the car, there are long lines in the dirt, like rope has been dragged there. Even warm under the sun, it makes him shudder.

He doesn't know why.

 

 

They look at the church afterwards, a simple building worn with faith and footsteps. Neither place tells him anything about where Joseph Seed might have gone. But they tell him something about Joseph Seed as a man, which is just as important. Rook takes notes.

Devout.

Well-known.

Isolated.

 

 

Burke bitches about John Seed on the way to their motel. John had ignored him, _was clearly suspicious_ no doubt. The man who’d called in favours in the FBI to look for his big brother, but Rook doesn’t argue. Just keeps looking over the timeline, calls Whitehorse to get the address for the witness they’ll see the next day. A teenage girl, Rachel Jessop, one of Seed’s flock and the last person to see him alive.

Rook arranges to meet with Jessop over the phone while Burke goes to pick up dinner, puts his suitcase in the motel room. It’s square, a bed too short for him with the same scratchy blanket all motels put under a thin duvet cover, barely enough to manage in September in Montana. The walls are cheap fake-wood panelling and the carpet is the fuzzy kind that guarantees static shocks, so he takes his socks off. He hangs up his corkboard, his nod to convention and his own, highly visual thought patterns.

Burke comes back after Rook’s pinned Joseph Seed’s photo to the centre, snorts at him but gives him first pick of the food. A kind of olive branch. Rook tells him about their next steps while they eat.

“Preacher meeting privately with a teen girl, on the edge of town?” Burke whistles. Kicks his feet up, scrounges at the bottom of his white takeout container, inviting Rook to speak with a crude look.

“I don’t make assumptions,” Rook says, without judgement. “He offered pastoral care. That’s all we know so far.”

Burke shakes his head, and Rook knows what he’s doing. He wants to know the size of Rook, doesn’t like the one he’s been presented with, so he needles. Looking for nerves. “Maybe her daddy took him out, caught him with his hands up her—”

The takeout bag rustles. A hiss, a sound like steam from a high-pressure valve, is the warning they get before a snake arcs up from next to the door.

It’s the biggest rattlesnake Rook has ever seen. Brown and cold-gold diamonds dappled down at least six feet of huge, heavy body, its rattle filling the room and spitting venom, baring fangs like knives. Burke screams, topples off his chair. Rook makes it to the door, but Burke has to go out the window to get out.

 

The deputy at the station laughs himself sick (Pratt, of all names) but comes, parks crookedly out the front of the motel while Burke smokes to steady himself. The county is small enough that the sheriff’s office is Animal Control too, it seems. He gets out still snickering but Rook thinks he maybe can’t help the ironic twist to his mouth. He’s dark-eyed, has that kind of dark humour stain and he simpers at them about prairie snakes (sees suits and thinks _city_ ) but opens the door for just a second before he slams it shut again, pale.

“Eastern diamondback,” Rook repeats, like he’d said on the phone, because a suit didn’t mean he didn’t know his snakes. Pratt looks at him like it’s his fault.

Pratt ends up calling the local vet ( _it’s the size of an anaconda, Lindsey – I don’t fucking_ care _what you’re doing, you’ll get over here_ ) who is dark-skinned and sheepish, has the round kind of glasses that are for fashion or children. He tries to backpedal out too when he sees it, but Pratt blocks him and it curls up on the bed, tongue flitting out to taste the air. Doesn’t seem to give a shit when Lindsey hooks it, “probably cold,” Lindsey decides, admiring it as it obligingly lets him lift it, slides into the wheeled cage he’d brought. “You’re here looking for Seed, huh?”

“Yes,” Rook says, since he’s already started. “Is it blind?” he asks, peers around to see it in the cage. It follows, those eerie blue eyes fixed and body swaying to keep it facing him.

“No,” Lindsey says. “The blue eyes mean it’s preparing to shed its skin. They’re pretty cool though, right? Look at that pattern.”

“Yeah,” Rook says dryly. “Super cool.”

Lindsey coughs. “Sorry. It must have been a hell of a shock.”

Rook nods at the cage. “I did think it was a bit North for these guys.”

“It is!” Lindsey agrees, a sudden energy. “It must have been brought here by a collector – I can’t think of who that might be off the top of my head, but it couldn’t have gotten here on its own. I think I’ve got the right stuff to keep it nice and comfortable until I can find the owner, but they’re definitely not native to Montana.”

It’s midnight. Rook doesn’t want to hear about the highly venomous snake from his motel room. He wants it, and everyone, to leave, so he can sleep. Lindsey doesn’t. “You… hey, do you think you’ll find him? Seed, I mean.”

“Yes,” Rook replies, and he’s not bragging, there’s no bluster. He finds people. It’s what he does.

Pratt wheels the snake’s cage away, helps Charles load it into the truck. It watches Rook with its blue eyes until it can’t see him anymore.

When he goes to bed that night, Rook has nightmares. His arms and legs bound, on his belly in the dirt and

_pride_

hissed like steam escaping.

 

 

 

 

The next day, Rook and Burke pull up to a house on the edge of town, three stories and lavish. A stern woman stands in front of it amongst the overflowing garden, a thin girl half-hidden behind her. They don’t have the same name (her _guardian_ , _guardian, not_ her mother) and the woman bristles like a porcupine.

The girl’s the one they need. Waifish, pale, brown hair cropped unflatteringly short and healing track marks in the crook of her elbows. Rachel Jessop is seventeen and pretty, and Burke gives Rook a knowing look behind her back when they’re led inside.

Someone’s already spoken to the woman, Delilah. They’ve already fucked it up, made assumptions and she’s defensive, cutting, jumping down Rook’s throat in the face of insinuations put to her by someone else. She’s useless to him like that and she won’t let Rachel speak, which is a problem when Rachel is still a minor. Rook can condense the facts into a single string of sentences, but the interview takes all morning.

Joseph Seed is known as The Father in town, and Rachel was a new member of his church. She joined after finding religion in rehab ( _a dedicated recovery centre for troubled youths_ ) and he made a point of checking with her, every Tuesday and Friday. They talked about how she was doing, he helped her study for her GED, and no. He’d never been inappropriate. No. He hadn’t said anything about where he was going.

No, he didn’t seem troubled.

Rachel catches Rook by the arm when Delilah goes ahead to show them the door, her heels clicking on the slate of the foyer. She has enough time for a sentence before Delilah turns around and it sticks with Rook, he writes it down, because with enough time for one unsupervised sentence, she tells him,

 _he sees me_ ,

with wounded eyes, present-tense.

In the days that follow, this will present as a trend.

He sees me.

 

 

 

They spend the afternoon going over John’s statement with him, which is unpleasant. John has presence – no, he has Presence – and his attention makes someone feel like the only person in a room. His disregard is equally powerful, and Burke gets mean with it. John turns his too-blue eyes on Rook and answers questions quickly, snap-snap-snapback for every little detail, and Rook feels a surge of pity for anyone who faces him in a courtroom. He insists on buying coffee and he’s not a man to miss details, so Rook is sure he gets Burke’s order wrong on purpose. He’s charming, and eloquent, and he doesn’t know what he’ll do if Joseph is dead.

He doesn’t say as much. But Rook can see John Seed, the way he runs his hand through his hair to self-soothe when he talks about Joseph’s disappearance, the tension around his mouth that the beard just doesn’t hide well enough. He loves his brother. The idea of him being dead is unbearable but he makes himself say “gone” four times like he’s bracing for bad news, trying to get used to it.

He describes Joseph as compelling. Insightful. Profoundly charismatic and generous, a man who dropped everything to see John through _a difficult time_ that Rook would bet was related to alcohol rather than narcotics. John Seed is a handful of razors already. Most people would be desperate to dull than kind of edge.

No, he hadn’t seemed afraid.

No, he didn’t have any enemies.

No, he wasn’t troubled. Not for a long time.

When they’re done, he asks Rook to keep him informed. Comes close to shake his hand when he does, blue-blue eyes and a smile gone brittle at the edges. There are tattoos on his forearms, an edge of a scar disappearing into his shirt. John Seed likes to hurt, because it’s what he knows. Joseph had helped, wanted him to be whole.

Rook shakes John Seed’s hand and knows this about him, because he sees him. And John looks back like he knows, the wary stare of a wounded animal.

Rook doesn't say anything else. He and Burke leave.

 

 

 

They get back to the motel late, after discussing the original findings with Whitehorse and his deputies. Rook throws his jacket on the chair and loosens his tie on the way to the bathroom. He doesn’t bother with the lights, just splashes water on his face in the dark, and it takes him a second to notice the dark shadow in the bathtub. He rubs the handtowel over his face and reaches for the light switch.

The rattlesnake tastes the air, lifts its head a little. The window is open, letting cold air in. _Cold_ , Lindsey had said, and then he’d _locked it in a cage_ and _taken it away_.

Rook looks at the snake for a moment. It really is the biggest one he’s ever seen, looped over itself in coiled in a full-sized bathtub. It looks back with those blue eyes, and he nods at it. Polite.

He closes the door behind him and calls the station. Pratt sends Lindsey right away this time and when Rook falls asleep, he dreams the sky is burning.

He tries to scream, but he has no voice.

 

 

 

They meet Jacob Seed the next day.

It doesn’t go well.

 

 

 

Jacob Seed is six-foot-three and built like a brick wall. Muscle of use rather than aesthetic, a man who works with his hands. He has dark red hair, a beard and the blue eyes the Seeds seem cursed with, memorable and sharp. He’s scarred liberally, vandalised by life.

He’s unimpressed with Burke, who meets him while Rook parks the car. They’d driven up the mountain to the veteran’s centre, the foliage casting the world in shades of red and gold. The centre is old and huge, a converted standard hospital from some fifty years earlier, and Jacob Seed runs an outpatient program there. Wilderness hikes and short camps, while he works as a security consultant remotely on the side.

He has a therapy _dog_ that Rook’s pretty sure an Attenborough has done documentaries about. It’s a fucking wolf, and its little yellow service animal vest is poor camouflage. Sheep’s clothing of a newer kind.

Jacob has his arms folded by the time Rook lopes up the hill towards them, he’s sneering at Burke. Rook has to remind himself that Burke is good at his job, he’s just out of his element because he’s gotten up in Jacob’s face, Jacob the _war veteran’s_ face, with his sidearm visible and aggressive posture. Jacob doesn’t seem triggered but he does seem irritated, flicks his hand like Burke is a gnat and turns bodily to face Rook (to cut Burke out) when Rook gets there.

“Agent,” he greets. He has a rough voice, no hint of South in it. Rook shakes his hand, lets his “dog” sniff it too, and Jacob sizes him up. It’s a curiously physical thing – Jacob looks at him and Rook feels weighed, measured.

“He says his brother seemed fine the day he went missing,” Burke tells Rook in an aside.

Rook’s sure he did. Burke is brawny and wears thick gold jewellery, his conventional notion of masculinity on his sleeve. Jacob would assume that any hint of emotional instability and there’s a chance Joseph could be written off, which is a disservice to Burke as an agent that speaks volumes about his short conversation with Jacob.

Rook doesn’t like to think Burke deserves it. He hasn’t mentioned suicide yet. But he takes over the conversation. “You had lunch with your brother the day he disappeared,” he says, cuts through small talk and gets right down to it.

Jacob approves. He recounts it with a soldier’s brevity, a concise series of answers to Rook’s questions with no extraneous details. He and Joseph had eaten lunch off one of the nearby hiking trails, the one that led to the lake high in the mountains. They’d discussed Jacob’s program, which had been renewed for another six months, and Joseph’s plans to offer the church space as a daycare for some volunteers, during the winter. Joseph had tried to convince him to come to church again, and Jacob had said no. They’d spent an hour together and parted in good spirits.

No, he hadn’t seemed afraid.

No, he had no enemies.

No, he wasn’t troubled. Not for a long time.

Facts dealt with, Rook tilts his head at Jacob. “When was he troubled?” he asks, and Jacob considers him, an interested light in his eyes.

Weighs. Measures.

“After his wife,” he says finally, and Rook feels like he’s succeeded in some small way. Measured up (and up). “She died in a car accident, over twenty years ago. Their baby died a little while after. It was a bad time for Joe, but he got better. He’s been better for a long time.”

A photo of a newborn, hidden in a bible Joseph touched every day (over twenty years later). “And you?” he asks. “Are you troubled, Mister Seed?”

Jacob smiles at him without humour. “My brother is missing,” he answers. “And they’ve sent two men, one weak, to find him. Might as well toss a coin.”

Rook absorbs that, the binary Jacob has presented, while Burke looks angry. He’s not sure which one Jacob means to be which, and Rook’s failure to be offended is probably telling him Rook has picked the better option. What to Burke would be the better option, but Jacob Seed has his back to a corner with fear, holds a wound barely healing that his brother’s absence has infected. Rook would prefer to be below his notice. He says goodbye and Jacob tells him to be careful on the drive down – the weather in Hope County is unpredictable this time of year.

 

 

Rook buys a thicker jacket (black, plain) on the way home, because the morning frost, the late-night cold is killing him. The snake’s in his room again when he gets back, curled up on his bed and looking pleased with itself. Fucking enormous, gold and brown and blue, blue eyed and waiting for him. It has an elegantly shaped head and its sway is hypnotic when it lifts it, looks at him, tongue darting out.

One of the deadliest snakes in the country and Rook just sighs because routine has a way of numbing even terrifying things. He hasn’t bothered to leave, he’s just sitting reading his notes while the snake watches him from the bed when Lindsey arrives in hysterics – he has no idea how it keeps escaping, or why it keeps coming back to Rook’s room. He thinks it must be a pet, well-handled, because it hasn’t shown any signs of aggression since the first night. A well-handled pet that no one has come for, a snake too far North for its subspecies. It snaps at him just once, lashes out and snaps Rook’s laptop shut, and then it’s gone.

Rook searches the room for eggs afterwards, even though it’s the wrong time of year, and finds nothing. The corkboard for Joseph Seed has his photo, the timeline, the forensic findings for his car, a shot of Rachel and one for each of his brothers. The photo of the baby is tucked into the corner – Jacob had given a name, and Rook writes _Faith Seed_ on a label above it. She'd died at three weeks old, born prematurely. Taken prematurely from her mother, who was already dead when the paramedics arrived on-scene at a three-car pile-up started by one drunk truck driver. 

 _Injuries incompatible with life_ said the report Burke had gotten from Whitehorse, because he was still a fucking FBI agent and Rook wasn't sure if he liked him yet, but that was a useless thought when he could still trust him to do his job. Her mother, Joseph's wife Anna Seed, twenty years old and her injuries incompatible with life and Faith Seed, who died a crib-death in her sleep three weeks later. Two days after Joseph Seed had gotten to take her home, twenty-one with a new daughter and a dead wife and then, in the end, nothing.  _CPR attempted_ says the file. Rook has done CPR on the job before. He knows in theory how to do it for a baby but he's too big to not be frightened of the thought, a visceral shudder at the idea of their tiny, still chest and just two fingers trying to bully their hearts back to life. 

Rook sits to look at the board, and he drums his fingers on the table while he thinks. John had sent a video of one of Joseph’s sermons that day, and Rook watches it on his phone with his headphones in. The camera angle isn’t perfect but Joseph Seed in motion is a force of nature, an earthquake, he’s kinetic energy gone to God and a Georgia baritone that spills out of him in celebration, in chastisement. He’s eloquent and compelling, and he lifts his hands in his white shirt and his black vest and the room explodes with voices, with adulation. He wears a rosary wrapped around his hand, crude and dark.

Rook watches it twice and Joseph Seed’s photo stares at him from the wall, he begins to see the shape of his quarry, now.

Joseph Seed is terrifying.

He has been missing for sixteen days.

 

 

 

Rook spends his dreams that night gasping for air, sealed in a box while dirt is shoveled on top of it. He tries to speak ( _brother_ ) and the shock wakes him, then, because Rook doesn't have any fucking brothers. 

He wakes tired. This is becoming a trend too. 

 

 

 

Their first few days of investigation tell them a lot about Joseph Seed.

He hadn’t had real enemies in town. Some people thought he was a little off, a little too intense, but he was generally very well-liked, if not loved. His brother John is a different story, mostly because he drives too fast and talks too fast and he’s better looking in that City Boy way that the local men wouldn’t like one bit but didn’t have the decency to be sorry for it.

People don’t know what to make of Jacob, when they’ve heard of him at all. Burke is suspicious of him – he’s a white male in his forties, a loner, with a history of mental illness. Rook isn’t interested in arguing a mental illness versus a mental injury with him, doesn’t want his take on PTSD, but due diligence means ruling out the family anyway. Burke dissects Jacob’s alibi while Rook looks at his board and thinks.

Joseph Seed was loved. Respected. Worshipped by some. He had followers, and his brothers, and except for John and Jacob, Rook has not found a single soul who thought they were his equal. One way or another.

Rook does not see him yet, but he is starting to. He is starting to see the shape of the gap Joseph Seed has left in the community, and who misses it. His congregation stops Rook on the street to ask for updates he can’t give, John Seed has somehow gotten his mobile number and leaves messages. The grocery store closest to the motel adds surcharges and glares when he tries to buy things there, while the one down the street gives him a discount.

The shape of Joseph is enough to hold, an empty space given weight, so Rook retraces his steps, the timeline of his disappearance, when Burke drives back to Missoula for the update they have to provide every week.

He starts with the church.

 

Rook gets to the church at six-thirty in the morning, the way Joseph did every day. The days are longer than the one Joseph walked into but not out of, so Rook pulls up in the early morning chill and his breath fogs in the air, the sunlight is breaking over the mountains to catch the spire of the church tower.

The world is silent except for the river, its slow passage past. Rook walks up to the church and unlocks it with the key Whitehorse gave him the night before. The doors are solid wood and heavy, they creak as they let him in.

He walked up the aisle, each fall of his foot a _tap_ on the hardwood floor. Worn and scratched with faith, exuberant feet. He reaches that eight-point mark, that Joseph Seed had carried with him everywhere, and then he turns.

Rook stands to face the doors, the empty pews, the dust motes drifting in through the sunlight starting to pour through the large windows, trying to banish the chill that lingered in dark corners.

Joseph started every day this way. Drove up an hour before anyone else arrived, prayed in an empty church, after he left his minimalist house. There is a word for it, but Rook doesn’t know what it is yet.

He will.

He leaves at ten. Time stretches like taffy in the church, pulled apart by sunlight and silence. The latticed windows send sun-warm diamonds across the floor and seeing them is sickening for a moment, makes his stomach lurch and rope stretch across his vision, bending the light into a coil of diamonds and teeth. To leave is a relief.

 

 

The drive up the mountain, past the hunting signs for deer and warnings for wolves, is long. It takes almost an hour, following the speed limit, and Joseph Seed obeyed the speed limit. Rook leaves the window rolled down even though the wind bites, lets his forearm rest on the sill so his hand almost touches the side mirror, and the word hovers in the back of his mind, he watches for what Joseph Seed would have seen.

Landscapes without people in them.

He pulls up at the veteran’s centre at eleven. The man sweeping the front steps recognises him, asks, “here for Jacob?”

Rook shakes his head because he isn’t interested in being judged by a Seed again (has measured up, and up) and he walks to the trail entrance Jacob had marked on the map for them, sets off into the falling leaves, the shades of gold and red collapsing from amongst more reserved evergreen trees.

The trail is peaceful. Quiet. The wind picks up and it smells sweet, fresh, the walk takes him uphill and when he stops, looks back, it’s steep enough that he can see out over the valley.

It feels distant, remote. Rook turns back and keeps going, ends up in a small clearing by the path before it turns into rockclimbing walls to get to the alpine lake high above. Rook pulls out his camera, uses the zoom to look around.

The position isn’t exposed. Jacob would have picked it, walked down the trail with Joseph and his wolf. He can see it for a moment, he has to close his eyes against Jacob’s rough voice and his own, gone South and the gravel stripped from it, has to step back into his skin with a shudder because

_why lord_

and he hears-feels slithering through the bushes, the rasp of dead leaves against his skin so he has to put his hands on his knees to brace himself, eyes as open as wide as he can manage to try and see the ground. To feel his skin. His eyes are open but it feels like he opens them again, and Jacob is standing there. Looking back at him, thoughtful.

Weighed. Measured.

Rook stands there and feels it happen. Straightens when he can, looks down at Jacob. Six-three and not likely to be used to men taller than him, much less Rook, who is trying to step back into his body.

“You lost?” Jacob asks.

“No,” Rook replies. Jacob nods, a sardonic tilt like his knows something and he sticks his hands in his pockets, saunters over to Rook. Rook doesn’t move back but he glimpses the wolf in his peripheral vision, moving silently through the trees. Two wild things, circling.

“How goes the hunt?” Jacob asks when he gets close enough. Dead leaves rasping in his voice too, eyes a single point of blue in autumn reds.

“I’ll find him,” Rook says ( _pride_ ) and not fucking bragging, not once in his life.

Jacob nods to himself. Smirks like there’s a joke only he knows. “Will you,” he says, doesn’t ask. Tilts his head. “You have family, Agent _Rook_?”

Rook blinks, sedate. A crocodile stare, his mother used to call it when she was tired, too tired not to. Sleepy, waiting, ready. “No,” he answers. “None.”

His mother doesn’t say anything anymore. Not for almost a year.

“I didn’t either,” Jacob says, faux-thoughtful. Threatening. He stops by Rook’s shoulder, just behind. “Not for a long time.” He leans in. “Good hunting, agent.”

 _There he is_ , Rook thinks. “I will,” he says instead. It’s time to walk back to his car. So he does.

 

Rachel Jessop’s guardian won’t let him see her again so soon, and not unsupervised. So Rook goes to the house and stands there for a while, eats a gas-station lunch and thinks. Sees in his mind the connections of Joseph Seed and Hope County, marks two, one for each brother, in red. The others he pins out in white in his mental map, waiting until he can get home to do it in real life, and they matter far less. He needs another red, another something, he’s missing _something_ and he knows that already.

He doesn’t know what direction to look in, yet. He can feel that shape of Joseph Seed, the missing corner that he needs to finish it. He’s not there. Yet.

One last stop.

 

Rook makes a note of two gas stations on his way, recalls the state of Joseph Seed’s gas tank. He’ll ask for their security footage on the way back, but knows the camera for the bridge toll-booth he passes is already long dead. Hadn’t worked in years. Decorative, basically. He takes the turn off to the lookout and his car bumps all the way down, rattles his teeth until he comes to a stop.

He gets out of his car and looks out across the mountains, out towards the South-East valley of Hope County. Where the Henbane flowed to die, splitting into hundreds of smaller creeks all the way to nothing. The sun sets while he looks around, checks for anything that might have been missed.

The sheriff’s department had brought dogs to the spot when they’d discovered the car, but the dogs hadn’t found any trail to follow. Just kept leading back to the car, the open driver-side door.

Standing by the Henbane at night is eerie. Rook doesn’t like it. It gets cold fast with the breeze off the water, though it feels like the goddamn sort of thing that Joseph Seed would do and when Rook tries to leave, something like

_sloth_

sounds in the wind through the trees, his skin feels too dry suddenly. His teeth are prominent in his mouth, his tongue feels heavy.

Ten minutes later, a light appears high on the mountain. Rook is sure for a moment it’s a firefly in his immediate range of vision but it isn’t - it's a building, maybe, or one of the towers that keep people connected. 

Rook lifts his camera. Takes a wide-angle shot for reference points, landmarks, digs out his phone and uses the compass to make sure. The light goes off within a minute. Rook lowers the camera, stands where they think Joseph Seed did, and looks at where the light had been.

All the places in the county and Joseph Seed had come here, then vanished.

The air is getting cold, so Rook gets back in the car. Marks where he’d stood on the map, the direction the light had come from. It’s not much. It might even be nothing.

 _Sloth_ , he thinks, the thought slides into his mind like an intruder, and starts the car.

 

 

 

 

The snake is curled up on the radiator when Rook gets back to the motel, copied DVDs of the gas station security cameras tucked under his arm. It’s curled up on it like a scarf too nice for him to afford, slick gold-brown and autumn in a large pile, barely lifting its head to watch him move around the room. Tail flicking just a little for the rattle.

Rook is not surprised, but something curls through him like hysteria, high and made of nightmares.

“I’m not naming you,” he says, “because I’m not keeping you,” and if this offends it, it still doesn’t leave. He calls Lindsey, who is outside town helping with a late season calf, coming out breech. He won’t be there for a few hours and Rook has to think about it, he has to _really_ think about going out into the fucking cold, even with his warm new jacket, and in the end he and the snake just stare at each other for a while.

He’s googled it. Snakes get milky blue eyes when they’re about to shed and this snake has pure ones, the pupils clear in ice-blue. But Lindsey had seemed sure, so he thinks about the cold and terrifying things made unimportant, and he sits by the table at the opposite side of the room, pierced by Joseph’s stare and the snake's gaze and under them the thought coalesces finally, the summation of Joseph Seed and the shape of the Father that Rook has worked towards.

“Lonely,” he says aloud, and the snake lifts its head at the noise, its unnerving stare fixed on him. He tries it out again to taste it. “Lonely,” that settles in right and the snake blinks just once.

He falls asleep waiting for Lindsey, is just unconscious with a suddenness that shocks him, right there in the chair. He dreams of lying in his bed in the dark while someone lies beside him and strokes his hair, lightly. It’s not a nightmare, but

 

(his skin doesn't fit, it's dry and smooth and interlocking pieces and he shakes, he's so fucking cold and he aches while that someone whispers

_lonely_

low-lovely like they know him and)

 

he wakes up in a cold sweat anyway.

The snake’s still on the radiator when he gets up. Watches him get dressed without blinking once, and he watches the DVDs to start his morning.

He finds what he's looking for while he waits for Burke to wake up, to bring coffee after his morning run. Joseph Seed in pixelated black and white at four-forty-one p.m., money spent on gas at the station by the bridge. Rook watches him take the turn-off instead of crossing it from the camera, sees just his wheels go the opposite way to where they found his car.

He doesn't seem afraid.

He doesn't seem troubled.

He moves with the grace of a predator and he smiles at the cashier before he leaves. Joseph Seed the preacher, terrifying. Joseph Seed, going the wrong way.

Burke comes in while Rook consults the map, spills coffee all over the motel room floor when he grumbles hello and the snake rises up over the curve of the radiator to see him better. 

"When the fuck did that come back?!" he howls and Rook remembers it is a frightening thing when he looks at it, the biggest rattlesnake he's ever seen and a feature of the room by now.

It can kill him. He hasn't thought that in days. His thoughts have not felt entirely his own in days.

He needs to get some fucking sleep.

"It's fine," Rook says, "it's just cold. Lindsey's coming. But get over here, I found something."

 

 

 

 


	2. gain the wolf

 

 

The road Joseph had taken forks like the river on the map, but leads ultimately South-West, to the lower series of waterways and marshes masquerading as a valley. Rook and Burke discuss it with Whitehorse and Deputy Pratt, who is in charge of aerial searches.

“He must have circled ‘round,” Whitehorse says, points at the bridges that Seed would have needed to complete the circuit. “But that’s around four hours, that whole way. And that’s assuming he didn’t stop.”

“Car wasn’t found until the next morning,” Burke points out. “Plenty of time.”

“It’d make more sense if he’d gone somewhere down the valley.” Pratt uncaps a pen and circles a far corner of the map, past the geothermal springs, by the basic where the Henbane overflowed to seethe. “Then he’d want to come back this way, avoid the shittier roads in the dark. He’d end up by the turn for where we found the car.”

“If he was the one driving the car back,” and even as Rook says it, he doubts it. For Joseph to drive past the bridge for his own house, to stop at the Henbane and vanish. Not afraid. Not distressed.

“You think someone dumped it?” Burke asks.

Rook gestures. “Accessible by main road but not visible from it. Visited enough to be found before a manhunt was launched. No residences nearby, no active farmland. It’s where I’d choose if I knew the area.”

Whitehorse pulls the edge of his moustache, salt and pepper and nicotine-yellow. “We’ll need to talk to the cashier.”

“Definitely,” Rook says. He looks at Pratt. “But first, tell me about the basin.”

 

 

There are very few places Joseph might have gone. A few rich, isolated couples in mansions – Delilah Jessop’s beautiful home drifting that way but not quite there. On the edge in so many ways. The cashier obliges them when they go to ask questions – Sydney, two counts possession, two years clean and a sunburst cross on the underside of her wrist. She is named for a city she’s never seen and its coastline is a sneer on her face. But she talks.

Joseph came in at four-thirty, or thereabouts. Full tank of gas but hadn’t said where he was going, and yes, she was certain about the time. She took her breaks around five when she worked the two-to-eight and remembered because she’d been hanging out for it. Remembered because it was the Father, Rook amends, because Sydney Corr (forty-five and hard) goes soft for a moment.

Joseph had asked her how she was. He always asked.

She’s not like Rachel Jessop but it’s how she says it that makes Rook tilt his head – like Joseph had driven away, the wrong way, and out of present tense. “What do you think happened?” he asks, and Sydney looks confused.

“He killed himself, right?” like it was obvious. Car by the Henbane, door hanging open. Keys in the ignition.

“Why do you think he would?” Burke asks. Sydney shrugs, the weight of explanation just sliding from her shoulders.

“We’re all fucked up,” she replies. “Who knows why.”

and Rook feels contempt then, the chronic pain pathway of disdain activating, a flare-up like a bad knee. People did that, said that so easily. Murder always _whywhywhy_ and people forgetting all killing needs motive and that went for Joseph Seed too, the Father, even if it had been Joseph who did it.

Means. Motive. Opportunity. It was amazing how much shorter a three-point list could get.

Rook smiles. Sydney returns it, wary. “Thank you for your time.” He leaves his card in case she thinks of anything else, and she deadbolts the door behind them.

 

 

He tells the snake about it while they wait (he waits) for Lindsey that night. It’s on the bed again, under the covers but head poked out to watch him. Rook taps his pen on the table, something it watches with a fed predator’s lazy interest.

“Suicide,” Rook pronounces for it, chair tipped back on two legs so he can stretch out his own. Too big for the bed, the doorway, the goddamn chairs. “Suicide,” again, and he tosses his pen onto the table in irritation. “People kill themselves when they don’t see another way out,” he informs it, a snake’s briefing on mental health, on pain exceeding resources for managing it. “Joseph Seed doesn’t want a way out, suffering’s the _point_. That gives it all a _point_.”

Rook knows enough about suffering to be willing to offer correction. Bad things happen. There’s almost never a purpose, a plan. But Joseph wouldn’t be interested, no – a man who kept his daughter’s photo in his bible where he saw it every day for twenty years, traced his fingers over her eyes screwed up in a newborn’s irritation at being so. Rook wondered if she had been like Joseph – medical sunglasses for eyes so blue they hurt.

“He wants to atone.” And Rook looks for who had spoken before he realises the words had come from him. Frowns, because it hadn’t felt like himself, a word he would have used but it seems to fit into the space, the tri-point gaze of Rook, Joseph Seed and the snake in his motel room. “Atone,” he tries again, forehead creased. The word tastes right (dry leaves and) another word, a silent clicking into place that felt like him, not a stranger’s thoughts.

“Angry.” Great and powerful and that mind, alien like angels made of light and fury. “God took his daughter and he’s so fucking _sorry_ ,” Rook says quietly, just to himself. “But more than anything, he’s angry.”

He hears a rattle, just for a moment. But the snake is still when he looks over. It watches him with its blue eyes, waiting to shed its skin,

but who the fuck knew what it was waiting for.

 

 

The snake goes for the cage easily when Lindsay comes. He looks pleased – jokes about how they have a standing appointment. Rook is too distracted to say much back; John Seed calls, he has to excuse himself and leaves Lindsey by his truck.

John wants an update. He’s called before but it’s eleven p.m. and he says _please_ and Rook says _yes_ before _no_ can escape, standing under the neon motel sign in the parking lot.

 

 

Someone speaks to him quietly that night. They lie at his side in his dreams – just him and the person in his bed and it’s not strange, it’s not frightening. They lie beside him, breath-close and they tell him of rooms without furniture but the walls still closing in, people wanting answers but never asking questions, of breathing tubes air-light but heavy. They press close until lips move against his temple, they shush him when he stirs and their murmur is,

_I see you,_

said heart-soft and loneliness is a sudden knife, he turns into their body and shoves himself close against warmth, their hands on his face and their skin falling to pieces in his grip, he opens his mouth to speak and they press their lips to his in time for him to taste ash as they crumble away.

He doesn’t wake for a long time, it feels like. He lies there in the dark. Alone. When he gets up that morning, minutes before his alarm, his eyes feel hot and dry like he’s been crying.

 

 

John has bought coffee when Rook arrives the next morning at the park, hands him one exactly the way Rook likes it; the way he’d ordered it the day they met. Their fingers brush and it’s habitual, the flirting, it’s John looking for leverage so automatically he doesn’t even realise and so Rook doesn’t react. He sits next to him on the park bench (John’s arm along the back) and,

yes, he’s optimistic.

Yes, progress has been made.

No, he’s never failed. No, he’s never given up.

That’s not what Rook does, he doesn’t know how and his mother used to say it’d kill him and he had to give her that. But that’s true of everything, in the end, so Rook made his choices knowing damn well what they did and here he is. He tells John that things are going well and that some are easier to talk to than others, never mentions names but John surprises him when he smiles, slow. There is a light in his eyes that reminds Rook of a stabbing he’d looked into, once. Not the man – the knife. “Delilah,” he says, mild. There are tattoos peeking out of his shirt sleeves, the edge of a dark line on the back of his hand. “Delilah Jessop?”

Rook shakes his head. It’s not John’s business.

John studies him. A cross-examination with his mind and Rook can see that brain working, but John still manages to surprise him. “Your mother died last year,” he says, out of fucking nowhere like he can read Rook’s mind. John nods to himself. “You didn’t take time off. Not a family man?”

Rook sips his coffee – it burns his mouth. “I was. But I had agreed to take a case, right after.” No family left, which really just left him as a man.

A wry smile, something inviting him to commiserate. “It couldn’t wait?”

“Can Joseph?” Rook returns, bland curiosity. The case had been a little boy. Maxwell, a dignified name, something to grow into for a boy with scabs on his knees. A runaway. Rook found him one state over and it had been one of the better ones, just because he’d been missing and not gone.

John’s smile thins.

No, Rook doesn’t say. He didn’t fucking think so. Questions always get very different answers couched in familiar skin. Rendered grotesque outside their abstract context, almost an insult.

They return to watching the park, kids going down the slide.

“You will find him,” John says softly, but it’s not a reassurance. There are too many teeth.

They finish their coffee in silence. Just how Rook likes it.

 

 

Rook drives out to the mountain afterwards. Burke is checking Jacob’s alibi, a dog with a bone and Rook just saw a light on a mountain, he could have imagined it, but he drives up to where the road is blocked ( _No Trespassing_ ) and stops the car. The barrier is up on the road where it carves through the cliffs on either side, just before the road gets winding. Making use of natural barriers.

He pulls a bottle of water out, puts it in the small bag he’s brought and slings it over his shoulder. Rolls his shoulders and looks up at the cliff faces, the high temporary fence and its heavy padlock. Rook scales the barricade and lands on the other side. That fucking easy, and he sets off.

 

Rook has split the area with a grid on his map. Searching for missing persons involves a lot of work in the woods and he likes it, actually. He likes being outside. The light was large enough to be seen from miles away, high enough or bright enough to be seen through the trees. That narrows it down and he expects a long, tiring day.

He doesn’t expect the wind.

It’s mild but chilling, biting and that’s nothing new in Hope County but he turns to face it and the air it brings wavers dark, like a shade drawn over him (in him). Shudders through him and everything is dark then, his breath is clouding in front of him,

_you’ll have to kill me_

and Rook doesn’t even fucking believe in god but he’s on his knees because someone put him there. His hands ache with violence, he’s bigger and stronger and Rook doesn’t feel this kind of anger, Rook doesn’t feel this kind of anything but venom pools in his mouth, he arcs up strong spitting

 _wrath_.

The sun is out when he catches his breath. Bright and easy like it always had been. Even with the wind, it is warm and there are long marks in the dirt. Like rope, dragged heavy, vanishing into the trees.

He follows them. He’s not sure why.

 

The tracks go on forever, lead him to a burnt clearing in the woods long after his neck hurts from bending under branches. There’s blackened metal – the remains of a twisted shape he doesn’t recognise and melted plastic like a chemical barrel and the whole thing is recent. Very recent, the smell of burning plastic lingers along with something acrid that sticks in his nose, gleaming flecks drifting through the air.

Rook pulls out his camera and sets it out as a crime scene. He takes samples, ash and scrapings from the metal frame, the ruined containers. They’re sickly green, melted into the earth and distorted. He catalogues everything within fifty yards of it and comes across a set of glasses, half-buried and almost destroyed in the ashes.

He brushes them off with gloved hands before he puts them in an evidence bag. It could be fire damage, discolouration, but the remaining glass shines sick-yellow.

 

 

Rook gets back to the station late, gets to work boxing up the samples for urgent transport. Burke casts him a narrow look the whole time, watches the courier leave with samples Rook hasn’t talked to him about yet and doesn’t want to.

He will. Rook is used to doing things he doesn’t want to and he’d found Maxwell, found the others, come back two weeks after his mother’s funeral to find it was too late to say goodbye.

Rook loads the photos on his computer and doesn’t say a goddamn word. Keeps his small-town mouth shut, just for  the day.

 

 

He can’t breathe.

Rook is dreaming, he knows he is, but he can’t breathe. Lying on his bed he wheezes, he strains for breath and on his back he can look up enough to see smoke pouring in through the vent about the bed, thick and black and choking. He scrabbles at his throat but he can’t move, he’s dreaming but he’s dying and pressure lands on his chest, someone pushes down hard (once _twice_ ) and a breath through a mouth sealed against his –

Rook jolts upright, awake, gasping for air. He hauls in breaths like he has to steal them, to steal oxygen before the air decides to resist. He pats at himself feverishly, looks back at the air vent and his hand touches something cool. He stops. Turns his head as he keeps the rest of his body still, as still as he can be still panting.

The snake is curled up by the side of his leg, looking back at him with eyes like black pits in the blue-dark room. Huge in the thin strips of light from the motel sign outside that filtered in through the gaps in the curtains.

Rook lifts his hand slowly. The snake doesn’t react. The heavy coil of its body is solid, immovable against his thigh.

 _Cold_ , Lindsey had said, no fucking consolation at all and Rook sleeps in his car that night.

 

 

Waiting for the sample analyses makes up a pattern of days. Rook and Burke trade off with the deputies, end up in unlikely partnerships to speak to the names on the short list of people Joseph might have spoken to in the basin.

The listed people are useless. Mostly rich couples who are leery of speaking to police and much less federal agents, the kind Rook would normally need a warrant to talk to. Gilded skeletons in wine cellars, too rich to need to use their closets.

Most of them have heard of Joseph. Fewer liked him. None saw him that day; or at least none that would admit it. His church is made of outcasts and loners, people of The Wrong Sort for them to want to associate with, much less want to pray alongside. Rook learns more about the deputies than he does about their missing person – gets to know that Staci really can’t help the dark humour, has a gallows living in him that makes a sudden stop to every short drop. He’s funny and cutting and a good balance to Hudson, who lights up like a firecracker every time someone looks at her wrong. Neither of them any match for Nancy from dispatch, who wears heels too high to be work-appropriate and reapplies her lipstick in a knife’s reflection.

“It means she likes you,” Staci confides in Rook one morning after Nancy takes a look at him and declares she could find use for six feet of him but would have to get creative with the rest, and Rook doesn’t blush but it’s a near thing.

Rook does everything he can think of to stop the snake (the dreams) but it doesn’t work. He dreams of someone lying beside him with quiet eyes and warm hands, night after night. Softly telling him about a man who hated his children ( _he drank, he hurt, he hated_ ), whose son killed him to save his brothers – about waiting and waiting and lonely (lonely). Of hands stroking his hair ( _you are loved_ ) and Rook saying things,  _saying_ thing like

she's dead now, ( _the funeral but I couldn't go_ ) and

she loved me but she never liked me, ( _too big too quiet_ ) and

sorry, sorry, _sorry_

and they listen to him, they give secrets like he's earning them and they touch him so

gently and Rook wakes up each time cold and curled around an empty space, ears aching with soft words and his skin too tight. It never ends and the snake gets closer until he wakes up with it sprawled over him again one morning and he’s too exhausted to push it away, to sleep in his car. He starts letting it be because he’s not sure he has a choice any more, his bones feel brittle when he wakes alone, alone, alone.

An inch turned mile and the snake responds to his negligence like it’s enthusiasm. Lindsey gets it driven to Missoula in desperation after another early a.m. call and Rook wakes up the next day to a shattered window, his bathroom lashed to pieces and the snake, methodically tearing through his warmest jacket. He puts a kibosh on inter-county transport but the snake only leaves it for a short while before it escalates again, decides to be a federal agent one day. Slinks into his car instead of his motel room, not that he notices until it rears its head with interest when he goes to pick up Staci and Staci shrieks and claws at the door as soon as he sees it. He yanks it open and just fucking books it, leaving behind just one curious rattlesnake (already nosing over the passenger seat) and Rook rubbing his temples.

This excursion earns it a trip back to Lindsey and he dreams of dying in the sun that night, lips cracked open and lungs dried to bleeding, skinless on dry, frozen ground while that soft voice screams in pain, makes a worse low-hurt noise of loss.

He wakes up to a dead rat in his shoes. He pretends not to see the snake curled up in his suitcase.

 

 

It’s that morning that it happens. Three days into a search he knows isn’t going to get him anywhere, three days after a meeting with John Seed, Rook gets a call.

Rachel wants to talk to him. Somehow, he’s not surprised.

 

 

Delilah Jessop is subdued when Rook sees her for his second meeting, Burke left behind at the station. Rook gets to the Jessop house five minutes early but Delilah is already waiting on the porch. Hair drawn back into a severe bun, clothes plain.

She shows him to the living room where Rachel is waiting and this time, she leaves them to it. Takes up a seat in the hallway looking drawn, like a name said by John Seed at coffee gave him power over her; like he was a fae thing made of a wide smile and old fear. Rachel sits across from him on the wide sofa, twisting the tassels of one of the many pointless fucking cushions between her fingers.

She has beautiful hands. Her voice is soft.

“I used to buy from a guy called Feeney,” Rachel tells him, scratches at her arm. Phantom itches, ghosts of nerves misfiring. “He left town a few months back, right after I overdosed and joined the church. But Joseph came around and asked about him the day he went missing. I’d. He,” her breath hitches, “he wanted to make sure I was okay, that I wasn’t looking for another dealer just because I,” and she has to take a moment, she puts her hand on her face.

Rook waits. She has narrow shoulders and his hands are heavy – he could break Rachel Jessop, a hand of comfort settled down, cracking her bird-bones like dry twigs.

“My guardian, she and I,” Rachel manages after a while, “we had fought. That morning. And she was threatening to kick me out. The Father talked to her and she took it back but he told me I could stay with him if things got bad again, he just didn’t want me to,” an expressive gesture. To give in. To go back. Joseph Seed, always moving forward, unstoppable. “He was always so nice to me,” Rachel adds, so quietly. Her eyes are red. She looks even thinner, frail. “I can’t believe he’d _do_ this,” in a whisper, and Rook lifts a hand to stop her.

“Do what?”

And she tells him.

 

Suicide. Someone has said it again, someone is saying it _still_ and it’s coming from someone with authority because Rachel doesn’t have the social network for gossip. She doesn’t have anyone to fucking _talk_ to and Rook isn’t angry at her but

                                        ( _wrath_ )

he is angry at someone.

The rest of the interview reads in points on his notebook, just like the rest but tainted cold-sour in his memory.

Wes Feeney had been the town pharmacist, professional and amateur. He’d sold Rachel and the other schoolkids weed when they could get the money, offered something stronger when a few of them came back for more. He’d left town in a hurry the night Rachel overdosed, when common knowledge amongst the teens became common knowledge to the Sheriff Whitehorse with his cartoon moustache and the grip of his gun worn into the shape of his hand. Rachel had gone to rehab and found God, found the Father afterwards, and her guardian had suspected her of developing inappropriate feelings and that’s when things had gotten bad again.

He hadn’t touched her like that, Rachel tells Rook. He’d held her hand when she cried, but it hadn’t felt like normal touch then either. It felt like grace (a self-conscious look) and like a prayer, something reverent but not physical, even skin on skin. Joseph had spoken to Rachel, then spoken to her guardian, and then he’d left.

Rook gets in his car, slams the door harder than he means to. He runs Feeney’s name before he drives away, boots his laptop up right there.

There are no matches in any database he has access to. No driver’s license, no social security.

Nothing.

 

 

Rook gets back to the motel late that night. He’s spent too long talking to Burke, talking to the deputies about a ghost called Feeney. There’s no photos of him, just word of mouth to assure him that the man was ever there. It feels wrong, the name sits wrong and he pushes the point – Joseph Seed asked about a man no one had heard from in months, a drug dealer, the _day he went missing_ but Burke is pushing the Jacob angle and has a split lip that gives Rook a hint as to why. Whitehorse is more willing but has no leads for him; Feeney had vanished the day Whitehorse had gotten wind of what he’d been up to. There was no trail to follow and until then, no one had any reason to suspect he wasn’t who he said he was.

He’d been the local pharmacist for ten years. Only in Hope County could the town pharmacist have worked for a decade _without a social security number_ and Rook has to take a few deeps breaths before he can try to think of next steps. He gets Staci on looking for a fucking _photo_ of the man, _anything_ they can match him to and he leaves, still angry.

So Rook takes one look at the snake on his bed and calls Lindsey. Lindsey ( _call me Charles_ ) blushes at the door and talks for five minutes longer than Rook had expected him (wanted him) to, rubs at the back of his neck. He sets the cage down and he’s telling Rook about the projector the local historical society sets up in the park for monthly movie nights, films cast onto a temporary screen and how one is coming up when the cage rattles, snap-shakes – the snake lunges and strikes the bars so hard that the cage falls onto its side, the rattling of its tail and hiss loud beyond belief. Spitting mad, two metres of angry fucking rattlesnake in a box, _enraged_ and Charles looks so terrified that Rook has to wheel it to the truck for him.

Lindsey peels off without telling him any more about movie nights. Rook can’t blame him.

 

Rook doesn’t have nightmares that night. He opens his eyes in the dark, not sure why, and someone is there suddenly, leans over and crushes his mouth with theirs, slick-hot and demanding, slides their tongue against his until he’s hard, hot-throbbing from a kiss like he’s a fucking teenager again. They’re on top of him with the suddenness of dreams, they’re heavy over him and fucking _hell_ they’re hard too, they’re a _he_  who grinds down and whispers

_mine_

into his skin and Rook is wrenched from sleep by his alarm, feeling like his gut’s been sliced open from the sudden deprivation but there’s someone in his room, there is someone _in his room_ but when he sits up, sidearm already drawn from his bedside table,

there’s no one there.

He lowers his gun slowly, feeling like a fool (intestines spilling out) and his mind is trying to say something, trying to tell him something because there is a word he needs to _say_ but he locks eyes with the snake at the end of his bed,

and he just can’t remember.

 

 

Hudson comes into the station looking pale while Rook is reading the sample analysis, at long last. The barrels had contained a substance their database has no match to, something like scopolamine, but not. Something like heroin, but not. The glasses had been too damaged to retrieve DNA from but there’s a partial fingerprint match to someone called Aaron Kirby (alias _Tweak_ ); an asshole from Arizona of all places, who pops up because he has a record already. Busted more than once on possession with intent to sell, and one count of, in an exciting break from the norm, impersonation of a member of the clergy. Which Rook didn't even know was a goddamn crime and sounds more than a little like pettiness.

He's looking forward to it but is disappointed by the rest. The equipment is anyone’s guess. Too damaged to get a good read on but not purely chemistry-oriented, something a bit weird about it. Rook looks at the report for what feels like an age, reads over _something weird_ until his professionalism dies by another inch in the face of the resources he’s been given.

But it’s good. It’s _something_ but Rook looks up from his computer when the silence stretches on too long. Whitehorse rubs his face. He looks older, suddenly.

“What happened?” Rook asks, and Nancy from dispatch shakes her head.

 

Sydney Corr had washed up on the bank of the Henbane sometime between midnight and six a.m. A bunch of kids home from college found her on their way down to the lakeside, coolers full of booze and everything they needed for s’mores (dropping to the ground) when they found pale limbs in the reeds. She died with white powder turned to sludge in her lungs and no one had seen her since their interview – his card is sodden white in her wallet.

Joseph Seed has been missing for twenty-one days. 

 

 

 

 


End file.
